Always as good as her word

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Janine Haines' place in history is assured by her being the
first woman to lead a political party in Australia.

Her death, at 59, however, is a time to reflect on how her
legacy is much more than that singular achievement.

Since the four-year period until 1990 during which Mrs Haines
led the Australian Democrats, the party has known troubled times.
It is easy to forget that, in 1990, the Democrats won the Senate
votes of one in eight Australians. Last month, that was down to one
in 50 - about a quarter of the support of three years ago.

Throughout her leadership, Mrs Haines was dogged by the
self-serving pledge of the party founder, Don Chipp, to "keep the
bastards honest" - a catchphrase he intended to differentiate his
foundling from Malcolm Fraser's Liberal Party, which he quit in
1977. Mrs Haines found it limiting and pushed the Democrats to
adopt a wider policy agenda as an alternative role to simply
checking the excesses of the main Senate players.

The Democrats polled 11.1 per cent of the Senate vote at its
first outing in 1977. Mrs Haines, a South Australian, became the
new party's first senator in December that year. She became a
driving force in turning her home state into the Democrats'
citadel. Nationally, the party's popularity started to decline
after the initial goodwill attracted by Mr Chipp, but the Haines
leadership revived its fortunes, almost doubling the Democrats'
Senate vote in 1990.

Despite her increasing popularity and widespread respect, Mrs
Haines made the politically fatal mistake of standing against
Gordon Bilney, the Labor incumbent in the marginal Adelaide seat of
Kingston in 1990. She believed the Democrats needed a lower house
presence to survive. Subsequent events suggest she was correct. In
1990, however, her choice of battleground was poorly conceived. In
the Chipp and Haines eras, their party was a rallying point for
disaffected small-l Liberals rather than traditional Labor voters
looking to change. Her quixotic and high-risk attempt to give the
party a presence in the House of Representatives perhaps would have
stood a better chance had she contested a marginal Liberal
seat.

A feisty, energetic politician whose word was her bond, Mrs
Haines's forthrightness put off some people. But there was no
doubting her integrity and honesty. She said that if she failed to
win Kingston, she would quit politics. She was good to her word,
even though her resumption in the Senate could have been arranged,
as was Fred Nile's return to the NSW upper house after he failed to
secure a spot for the Christian Democrats in the Senate last
month.

Janine Haines's departure from politics shook the Democrats, who
bumbled along with years of mediocre leadership until Cheryl
Kernot's ascension. But more than political wiliness went with her.
She could play the delicate art of compromise because she was
intelligent and because her undertakings stuck. She understood that
trust must be earned.

Freedom and the drugs trade

The invasion of Iraq followed so closely the demolition of
Afghanistan's Taliban regime that the latter's aftermath is often
little more than an afterthought. The third anniversary of the
Taliban's toppling, however, provides a suitable opportunity for a
stocktake, principally because it coincides with publication of a
United Nations assessment of Afghanistan's rebirth as a giant of
the international heroin trade. It demonstrates the intrinsic
incompatibility of notions of political freedom with suppression of
such deadly scourges.

Consider this: a regime of religious zealotry seizes control of
a war-weary Afghanistan in the mid 1990s and imposes medieval
restraint, discrimination and punishment on its people, all in the
name of extremist interpretation of Islamic text. Life is hell, but
Afghanistan under the Taliban might not have been much more than a
passing thought for the West had Arab terrorists, protected and
nurtured by the Taliban, not directed the September 11, 2001,
attacks on America. That dealt the Taliban into the top league of
loathing by the West and its death warrant was signed the same
day.

Did the Taliban achieve anything the West might consider
worthwhile? In 2000 it did something no one had managed: it stopped
cultivation of opium poppies in all but that corner of Afghanistan
controlled by the enemy Northern Alliance. It did it by cutting off
offenders' hands. The Taliban continued to profit, by stockpiling
opium and then selling when global demand boosted the price, but
the net effect was a restriction of the heroin trade.

Three years after the Taliban's demise, Afghanistan is a country
of people weighing up whether they can achieve more through foreign
aid or from the opium trade. Signs are that the latter is emerging
supreme.

According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the area of
Afghanistan under poppy cultivation has jumped by two thirds to
131,000 hectares, producing 87 per cent of world opium production.
The trade occupies a 10th of the population but is the equivalent
of about 60 per cent of Afghanistan's legal economy.

All this has frightening consequences for Western nations
fighting drug use. The strategy of denying narcotic production at
its source is not only not working but, in Afghanistan's case,
going quickly backwards.

It raises enormous worries for Afghanistan, too. If it doesn't
get international help to contain the nefariousness of warlords and
others, narcotics will become Afghanistan's central purpose and the
democracy the West is trying to establish there will be blown away
like sands across the desert.